The Milan Santa Giulia area is destined to change its face thanks to the urban regeneration project presented by MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects and Lendlease, real estate investment company. The area will become central for the next Olympics in 2026, but will remain a city reference point even and above all afterwards. Let’s discover the project together.
The affected area covers 1.1 million square meters in the south of Milan, of which almost 300,000 have already been built, out of a total of 672,000 development rights. The project, which aims to create a central hub in view of the Olympic Games which can then remain a legacy of the city for a long time to come, envisages an interconnected system of services which ranges from the future Olympic Arena to green and commercial spaces whose construction will be completed by 2026.
The master plan of Mario Cucinella Architects is inspired by the plant world; L’area has in fact the shape of a leaf to symbolize a body that grows in harmony with the surrounding environment. Santa Giulia must in fact return to becoming an organism interconnected to the city fabric also thanks to the large urban park, which will be the third largest in Milan, and sports and leisure facilities including the Children’s Museum, the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, the Eventim Arena, the Spark Business District and Soul commercial districts. Naturally, the residential part is not missing, with the Spark Living complex, and the Linfa green district.
Milan Santa Giulia is one of the most important urban regeneration areas of the cityà, promoted by Lendlease, and acts as a hinge between the Lombard capital and the southern provinces of the region, as well as being a hub for various territorial systems: connection axes (Linate airport, the ring road and motorway system, the railway station of the Rogoredo high speed line, the M3 and M4 lines); territorial infrastructures (the vegetable market, the former slaughterhouse, the Porta Romana railway station); mainly residential historic nuclei (Rogoredo); the urban “voids” that represent the reserve of natural spaces of the metropolitan area (Chiaravalle, the Monluè Park, the Lambro river with its park and the Forlanini Park).
The cornerstone of the project is precisely the dialogue with the landscape: the infrastructures of mobility and transport of the entire neighborhood are connected to the urban green spaces, to the areas intended for agriculture in the south-eastern area of the territory and to the waterways. A contemporary center is thus generated, innervated by open and natural spaces, which on the one hand is respectful of the existing urban fabric to which it can expand its regenerative impact, and which on the other is connected with the surrounding context from which it absorbs its proportions, morphology and identity.
